Summary

One evening in 1588, just weeks after the defeat of the Spanish Armada, two young men landed in secret on a beach in Norfolk, England. They were Jesuit priests, Englishmen, and their aim was to achieve by force of argument what the Armada had failed to do by force of arms: return England to the Catholic Church.

Eighteen years later their mission would be shattered by the actions of the Gunpowder Plotters -- a small group of terrorists who famously tried to destroy the Houses of Parliament -- for the Jesuits were accused of having designed "that most horrid and hellish conspiracy."

Alice Hogge follows "God's secret agents" from their schooling on the Continent, through their perilous return journeys and lonely lives in hiding, to, ultimately, the gallows. She offers a remarkable true account of faith, duty, intolerance, and martyrdom -- the unforgettable story of men who would die for a cause undone by men who would kill for it.

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God's Secret Agents - Alice Hogge

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Chapter One

‘… as the waves of the sea, without stay, do one rise and overtake another, so the Pope and his … ministers be never at rest, but as fast as one enterprise faileth they take another in hand … hoping at last to prevail.’ Sir Walter Mildmay MP, October 1586

ARMADA YEAR, 1588, swept in on a flood tide of historical prophecies and dire predictions. For the numerologists, who divided the Christian calendar into vast, looping cycles of time, constructed in multiples of seven and ten and based on the Revelation of St John and the bloodier parts of the Book of Isaiah, the year offered nothing less than the opening of the Seventh Seal, the overthrow of Antichrist and the sounding of the trumpets for the Last Judgement.¹

For the fifteenth century mathematician Regiomontanus, although he had not been quite so specific about the year’s unfolding, still the promise of a solar eclipse in February, and not one but two lunar eclipses in March and August had not, he had thought, augured well.* will be great lamentation.’ As the year began, in Prague the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II, himself a keen astrologer, scanned the heavens for signs that his was not the empire to which Regiomontanus referred. He could discover little more than that the weather that year would be unseasonably bad.²

The printers of Amsterdam rang in the year with a special edition of their annual almanac, detailing in lurid prose the coming disasters: tempests and floods, midsummer snowstorms, darkness at midday, rain clouds of blood, monstrous births, and strange convulsions of the earth. On a more positive note, they suggested that things would calm down a bit after August and that late autumn might even be lucky for some, but this was not a January horoscope many read with pleasure.

In Spain and Portugal the sailors assembling along the western seaboard talked of little else, no matter that their King, His Most Catholic Majesty Philip II of Spain, regarded all attempts to divine the future as impious. In Lisbon a fortune-teller was arrested for ‘making false and discouraging predictions’, but the arrest came too late: the year had already begun with a flurry of naval desertions. In the Basque ports Philip’s recruiting drive slowed and halted ‘because of many strange and frightening portents that are rumoured’.³

In Rome it was brought to the attention of Pope Sixtus V that a recent earth tremor in England had just disgorged an ancient marble slab, concealed for centuries beneath the crypt of Glastonbury Abbey, on which were written in letters of fire the opening words of Regiomontanus’ prediction. It was felt by the papal agent who delivered this report that the mathematician could not, therefore, be the original author of the verses and that the prophecy could stem from one source only: from the magician Merlin. It was the first hint that God might be on the side of the English.⁴

But in England no one mentioned Merlin’s intervention in international affairs and the English almanacs that year were strangely muted affairs, proffering the general observation that ‘Here and in the quarters following might be noted … manystrange events to happen which purposely are omitted in good consideration.’ With their fellow printers in Amsterdam working round the clock to meet the public’s demand for gruesome predictions, it seems odd the English press were grown so coy, particularly when the editor of Holinshed’s Chronicles had written the year before that Regiomontanus’ prophecy was ‘rife in every man’s mouth’. But it was not in the Government’s interest that England should be flooded with stories of death and destruction, for it was all too likely that any day now it would be visited by the real thing.*⁵

For some four years now England and Spain had been at war: an undeclared phoney war, fought at third hand, on the battlefields of the Low Countries and up and down the Spanish Main, by mercenaries and privateers, most notably the ‘merry, careful’ Francis Drake. Drake’s raid on the port of Cadiz in April 1587 had cost Spain some thirty ships and had bought England a twelvemonth reprieve. But all this did was to postpone the inevitable until the fateful year 1588, because the Spanish were coming, with the mightiest fleet that had ever been amassed. Sixty-five galleons like floating castles, many-oared galleys, cargo-carrying urcas, nimble pataches and zabras, all these had been assembling in the west-coast ports of the Iberian peninsula since 1586. Together they could hold some thirty thousand men, numerous cavalry horses and pack animals and all the many carefully counted barrels of food and water needed to sustain a force of such size. The normally tight-fisted Pope Sixtus – ‘When it comes to getting money out of him, it is like squeezing his life blood,’ wrote the Spanish ambassador Olivares to King Philip – had swallowed his respect for the English Queen, Elizabeth I, and signed a treaty with Spain, promising a million gold ducats (about £250,000) to Philip shouldhe manage to conquer England, so long as the next English ruler, a position on which Philip had designs himself, returned the country to Catholicism.* The Duke of Parma, commander-in-chief of the Spanish Netherlands, was only waiting for the signal to embark his army in a flotilla of flat-bottomed landing-craft, cross the English Channel and sail his forces up the Thames estuary. And all across Europe, rulers and ruled alike stopped what they were doing to watch and wait for the outcome to this clash between the forces of good and evil. This was ideological warfare of a type never before fought in Europe, transcending national boundaries and old-fashioned disputes about landownership. And while the opposing ideologies were, inevitably, somewhat tarnished by political and personal self-interest, nonetheless, in its purest distillation, this war was billed as the deciding round in the conflict between Catholicism and Protestantism, the final answer to a question that had paralysed sixteenth century Christian Europe, the question of what you could and could not believe. Though few could afford to be combatants, no one could afford to be neutral. But the result, it seemed, was a foregone conclusion.⁶

Ranged against England were the combined forces of Spain, Portugal, the Italian States, and the Spanish Netherlands, with France, though as yet undecided, also likely to join the Catholic crusade. The English troops, in comparison with Spain’s professional, battle-hardened soldiers, were an ill-trained rabble of amateur militiamen, drafted into service at county-wide musters and required to pay for their own gunpowder for the duration of combat. The officers were no better. Most refused to take orders from anyone lower in social standing than themselves. Had it not been for the remodelling of the Queen’s Navy by Drake’s fellow sea-dog, John Hawkins, the outcome of the Armada conflict might well have been very different. Still, Hawkins’s fleet of twenty-three warships and eighteen smaller pinnaces was heavily outnumberedby the massive, some hundred-and-thirty-strong Spanish and Portuguese Navy. And his belief that the success of Elizabeth’s ships lay in long-range gunnery rather than traditional short-range grappling was not helped by those English gunmakers still busily selling cannons to the Spanish as late as 1587.⁷

So at the beginning of 1588 the odds on the Deity being a Spaniard were temptingly short. ‘Pray to God’, wrote one member of the Armada force, ‘that in England he doth give me a house of some very rich merchant, where I may place my ensign.’ Indeed, for all those about to embark with the Armada, England was a place of lucrative spoils and members of the fleet were delighted by how easy it was to obtain credit on the eve of sailing. Many spent their money on fine clothes for the occasion and one returning Englishman reported that ‘the soldiers and gentlemen that come on this voyage are very richly appointed’. If the hard-headed bankers of Europe were putting their money on an easy victory for Spain, it was small wonder that in December 1587 a false rumour that the Spanish were coming sent the population of England’s coastal towns flying inland for protection.⁸

As May 1588 gave way to a blustery June, a cargo ship under Captain Hans Limburger made its way slowly north from Cadiz, bound for the Hanseatic port of Hamburg. At Cape Espichel, just south of Lisbon, Limburger saw a sight that stunned him. Although Spain’s preparations were no secret to anyone in Europe, nothing had prepared the German captain for this. For one whole day Limburger’s ship beat slowly past the assembled Spanish fleet, ‘the ocean groaning under the weight of them’. At Plymouth Limburger was able to give the port authorities the confirmation they needed: the Armada was under sail and on its way.⁹

Now, after many months of uncertainty, the orders were finally given for all army officers to remain on call and for all troops to be ready to move at an hour’s notice. The better-trained soldiers were positioned near the most likely landing sites, to attack the invasionforce while it was disembarking and at its most vulnerable. Barriers of logs and chains were brought in to seal off main roads and all routes into towns and cities. Militia groups were instructed in the scorched-earth policy they were to employ should the Spanish once get a foothold on land. Strategic points such as bridges and fording places were put under guard and instructions were given that in the coastal towns and villages no one was allowed to leave once the warning beacons had been lit, under pain of death. Then the nation waited.¹⁰

For now the bad weather Emperor Rudolf had seen written in the night skies and that had blown and sobbed its way through Europe for the better part of the year began to play its part in the conflict, breathing new life into the spectres of Regiomontanus’ prophecy. By the end of June the Spanish fleet was still holed up in the port of Corunna as storms swept the Iberian coastline. A month later it was the English Navy’s turn to suffer the high winds and heavy seas as it carried out its daily patrol of the western reaches of the English Channel. ‘I know not what weather you have had there,’ wrote Admiral Lord Howard of Effingham, commander of the fleet, to Sir Francis Walsingham, Principal Secretary of State, at court, ‘but there never was any such summer seen here on the sea.’ With the waiting came the whispering. ‘There has been a rumour at Court, which has spread all over London,’ reported Philip II’s eyes and ears in the English capital, ‘that the Spaniards have orders from their King to slaughter all English people, men and women, over the age of seven years.’¹¹

Finally on Friday, 29 July the Armada was sighted off the Cornish coastline, and for Howard, Hawkins, and Drake, and the men of the English Navy, battle commenced. Throughout the following week, between contrary winds and dead calms, the smaller, more mobile English vessels harried their larger, cumbersome Spanish counterparts the length of the Channel, trying at every turn to disrupt the tightly packed crescent formation adopted by the Armada fleet. Shrouded in a heavy pall of gunsmoke it was hard enough for those in the thick of each encounter to know whatwas going on about them, but for those onshore and far inland the desperate clawing into wind to gain the advantage, the agonizing and hypnotic slowness of the combatants closing on each other, the silence broken by the roar of gunfire, was all a distant, disconnected dream. In mainland Europe rumour had the Armada safely landed in a defeated, humbled England, with a captive Queen Elizabeth on her way to Rome, to appear, barefoot and penitent, before Pope Sixtus. In England they kept on waiting.¹²

On Saturday, 6 August at 5 p.m. the Spanish fleet dropped anchor off Calais to make contact with the Duke of Parma. About midnight on the following day the tide turned, bringing with it, blazing out of the darkness, English fireships, packed with explosives, and in panic the Spaniards cut their cables and fled. The last chapter in the Armada’s story had begun. ‘From this piece of industry,’ wrote one Spanish officer, ‘they dislodged us with eight vessels, an exploit which with [our] one hundred and thirty they had not been able to do nor dared to attempt.’ What the fireships started, the storm-force winds now continued, sweeping the scattered Spanish fleet first towards the shoals of the Zeeland banks and then helplessly northwards up the English coast. For another Spanish officer this had become ‘the most fearful day in the world’. The Duke of Medina Sidonia, the Armada’s ill-fated and much maligned commander, now placed himself squarely in the hands of ‘God and His Blessed Mother to bring him to a port of safety’.*¹³

The report of the Armada’s inadvertent flight north reached Queen Elizabeth as she was addressing her troops at Tilbury camp on 18 August, more than a week after the event. But even this good news did not come rumour-free, for now the Duke of Parma and his army were said to be on their way across the Channel. It was not until the end of August that the Dean of St Paul’s was ordered to announce officially that the Armada had been defeatedand Philip II’s agent in London was able to write home to Spain on 7 September that ‘the Lords of the Council went to St Paul’s to give thanks to God for having rescued the realm from its recent danger’. Just three days later, though, another alarm was spread that the Armada was on its way back. By the beginning of November, after ten weeks of continued uncertainty, the public’s nerves were frayed to unravelling point. Parliament, which was to have met on 12 November, was prorogued until February ‘as it was seen that both people and nobles were weary of so much trouble’, wrote Marco Antonio Micea, a Genoese resident in London. ‘We are in such alarm and terror here that there is no sign of rejoicing amongst the Councillors at the victories they have gained. They look rather like men who have a heavy burden to bear.’ Even Elizabeth, who was not normally chary when it came to her own personal safety, was persuaded by her Council to stay away from St Paul’s ‘for fear that a harquebuss might be fired at her’. Micea noted that the fifty-five-year-old Queen looked ‘much aged and spent’. Perhaps the Spanish fleet had made for Scotland and had succeeded in persuading King James VI to avenge his mother, Mary, Queen of Scots’ execution of the year before; or perhaps they had rounded Scotland and were now in Ireland, stirring up trouble among the rebels there. In response to this new fear the Queen ‘sent Sir Thomas Perrot to raise 2,000 men in Wales, and take them over [to Ireland] with all speed’. The extent of Elizabeth’s anxiety may be measured by her willingness to throw yet more money at the conflict.¹⁴

But if in England no one could quite believe they had won, on the Continent no one could believe that the Spanish had lost. The French ambassador in London had spent his summer merrily reporting stories of heavy English casualties, so when the English ambassador in Paris, Sir Edward Stafford, produced 400 pamphlets giving the English version of events, he was met with frank incredulity. ‘The English ambassador here had some fancy news printed stating that the English had been victorious,’ wrote Don Bernadino Mendoza, the Spanish ambassador in Paris, ‘butthe people would not allow it to be sold, as they say it is all lies. One of the ambassador’s secretaries began to read in the palace a [report] which he said had been sent from England, but the people were so enraged that he was obliged to fly for his life.’ Only Pope Sixtus remained unimpressed by the European rumour-mill, refusing to loosen his grip on the million gold ducats he had promised Spain until he had better proof of Spanish success.¹⁵

On 24 November England at last felt confident enough to celebrate its victory and ‘a solemn procession … was held to give thanks to God for the scattering of the Spanish fleet’. Through winter streets hung with blue cloth, Elizabeth ‘was carried in a gilded chair … drawn by two grey horses royally caparisoned … to the great cathedral of St Paul’s’, from the battlements of which eleven captured Armada banners streamed out above the city. Here, Elizabeth read out a prayer she had composed specially for the occasion. The mood was one of relief, but also, more pertinently, of sober thanksgiving. In the words of the medal struck to celebrate England’s victory: ‘God blew and they were scattered’. The victory was His.¹⁶

And in giving this victory to God, Elizabeth extended a process begun by her father, Henry VIII, many years before: the process of nationalizing England’s state religion.* It was an inadvertent process, born out of fear: Henry’s fear of plunging his country back into yet another round of civil war if he failed to produce a male heir. And it was a process concluded in fear: the fear of standing alone and vulnerable against the richest and most powerful nation in Europe. The God who won the Armada could not be a Protestant God, at least not in the way Protestantism was understood throughout the rest of Europe. That God had demonstrablyfailed to help the Calvinists in the Low Countries; to protect the Huguenots of France from the St Bartholomew massacre of 1572; to save William of Orange from assassination in 1584. Neither could He be a Catholic. Not when the Armada carried at its head a consecrated standard bearing the rallying cry ‘Arise, oh Lord, and avenge thy cause’. Not when each ship had been provided with its own priest and each member of the expedition had received absolution in advance for the blood he would shed.* Therefore, He could only be an Anglican God, that compromise and most English of Gods, who continued to frustrate both Catholics and Protestants in almost equal measure.† So the subtle propaganda ran. In a Europe ravaged by wars of religion, only the English had chosen correctly.¹⁷

And how lucky it was that God should be an Anglican, an Englishman, for no one believed for a moment that England’s conflict with Catholic Spain was over. Indeed, at the beginning of November the Venetian ambassador to Spain reported home to the Doge that ‘In spite of everything, His Majesty shows himself determined to carry on the war.’ So though the coach that bore Elizabeth to St Paul’s Cathedral ‘was open in front and on both sides’ so that she might better be seen by crowds of cheering Londoners, yet her Government was taking no risks. An order had been given ‘that in every household along the route no one should be allowed to look out from the windows while she was passing, unless the householder was prepared to stake his life and entirefortune on his trustworthiness.’ This was an England gripped in the jaws of fear and suspicion.¹⁸

On Friday, 28 October 1588 a sailing ship beat its way slowly up the Norfolk coast. On board, its passengers scanned the shoreline for a suitable landing place. Having spotted what looked like a safe point between Happisburgh and Bacton, some miles to the south of Cromer, they ordered the crew to drop anchor until nightfall. As darkness fell the ship’s boat was launched and headed into shore. When it returned to the ship, it left standing on the beach two young Englishmen of whom the English Government had every reason to feel fearful and suspicious. The pair were Catholic priests belonging to the Society of Jesus, and their intention was to succeed where the Spanish Armada had failed: to return England to the Catholic Church. If the Armada was the latest in a progression of Franco-Spanish ‘Enterprises’ sanctioned by the Pope and designed to restore English Catholicism through force of arms, then these two young men represented Rome’s second line of spiritual attack: force of argument.*¹⁹

Argument had always been the Christian Church’s best weapon against heresy, chiefly because most heretical behaviour was thought to be a consequence of ignorance, poor judgement, or an imperfect understanding of the teachings of Christ.† Such hereticswere not sinful therefore, merely misguided, and required little more than clear reasoning to make them see the error of their ways. Of course there were other heretics who wilfully rejected Christ’s doctrines – out of pride, or a lust for power perhaps. They were sinners and merited the full weight of the Church’s wrath, which, ever since the eleventh century, had usually meant burning at the stake. There was a further subset of heresy still: schism, the rejection of papal supremacy. For the rebellious schismatic (who might uphold all Christ’s other teachings but this one) as for the misguided heretic, argument was deemed the best form of correction. So while Rome supported the invasion of England and the deposition of Elizabeth – her wilful heresy had imperilled the souls of her countrymen and God would forgive the use of force against her — it also dispatched its army of arguers. It was belief in the divine purpose of their argument that filled the two Englishmen now standing in the dark of a Norfolk beach, straining to hear above the noise of the waves on the shingle any sound to suggest their landing had been observed.*²⁰

Neither man had been long enough in Rome to forget the seeping chill of late October English rain. The bad weather that had so hampered the Armada had not abated and the year was ending with as cold a spell as it had begun. But the rain and the cold were the least of the two men’s worries as they now tried to put as much distance between them and the coast before dawn. In the dark it was impossible to pick a path that did not lead them up to a house instead of out into open fields. Twice, three times, a dog barked as they neared one of the fishermen’s cottages flanking the beach and hastily they retraced their steps. Finally, they headed into a nearby wood to take cover until first light. There, in whispers, they decided it would be safer to separate and each make his own way to London; that way, if one of them should be caught, the other still had a chance of reaching the capital undetected. As soon as it was light enough to see, the older of the two men, twenty-seven-year old Edward Oldcorne, son of a Yorkshire bricklayer, made his way northwards out of the wood towards the town of Mundesley. On the road he fell in with a party of sailors, demobbed and returning home after the defeat of the Armada, and in their company and with the cover they unwittingly afforded him, he made his way to London.

Meanwhile, his companion was leaving the wood by a different path. John Gerard was twenty-four. He was born on 4 October 1564, the son of the prominent Lancashire landowner Sir Thomas Gerard, a former county sheriff.* At the age of five John Gerard was removed from his parents’ care when it was discovered his father was involved in a scheme to rescue the newly imprisoned Mary, Queen of Scots from Tutbury Castle in Staffordshire and restore her to the Scottish throne. Sir Thomas Gerard was arrested and held in the Tower of London until 1573. On his release he collected his eight-year-old son from the family of strangers on whom he had been forcibly billeted and returned with him to Lancashire, to Bryn Hall, the Gerards’ estate. Whatever the effect on John Gerard of being ripped from his home at so young an age, these events did little to persuade him to conform to the State Church. At the age of just twelve he was sent down from Exeter College, Oxford for refusing to attend a Protestant Easter service.²¹

In the summer of 1577 Gerard applied for, and received, a licence to travel abroad to study. For the next three years he attended lectures at Dr William Allen’s English College, first at the University of Douai in the Spanish Netherlands, then, when the college was expelled from there, at the University of Reims. Allen, an exiled Oxford academic, had opened the English College as a training school for those English boys still wishing to enter the Catholic priesthood, now that this was forbidden to them in their own country. The college also offered a thorough education to any English student unwilling to swear allegiance to the new Church of England, an oath required of all those graduating from the universities of Oxford and Cambridge. At Reims Gerard first came into contact with a member of the Society of Jesus, an English Jesuit named Lovel, and from Reims he travelled to Cleremont, the school of the French Jesuits near Paris, determined to join the Society himself. He was not yet sixteen.²²

The Society of Jesus was a new religious order, founded in 1540 by a Spanish ex-soldier called Ignatius Loyola, with the specific aim of converting the heathen and reconciling the lapsed. Loyola dreamed of countering the rise of Protestantism and restoring the Catholic Church to its former pre-eminence in Europe. To this end he had brought all his army training to bear on the problem in hand: ‘I have never left the army,’ he explained, ‘I have only been seconded to the service of God.’ His Jesuits operated as a tightly knit organization bound by a rigid, even military discipline, and Gerard, who used his time at the college to continue his studies, was quickly impressed by the elite band of priests who taught him. When illness forced him to return to England in the spring of 1583, he spent his convalescence disposing of property and possessions in preparation for a new life among them.²³

His difficulty came in leaving the country for a second time. To leave England without State permission was a crime according to English law. To leave England to train as a Catholic priest was still worse a crime, the effects of which were often felt by the criminal’s family in his absence. Gerard chose to leave the country without a licence. With a party of other Catholics, all heading abroad with intentions similar to his own, he set sail from Gravesend early in November 1583. The weather was against them. After five days at sea, making heavy progress into strong winds, they were forced to put in to Dover. At Dover it was revealed they had a spy in their company when the entire party was arrested by customs officers and sent up to London for questioning. The spy, Thomas Dodwell, reported back to the Privy Council how the group had bribed ‘Raindall, the [officer] of Gravesend, [who] receiveth money of passengers, suffering them to pass without searching.’²⁴

While his companions were imprisoned, the nineteen-year-old Gerard (whose cousin Sir Gilbert Gerard was Master of the Rolls and held some sway with the Government) was taken into custody first by his uncle, George Hastings, brother to the Earl of Huntingdon, then by the Bishop of London. Both men set about encouraging Gerard to convert to the Protestant faith. Both men failed. It was a measure of his strength of will that the teenager held out against the arguments of his two more powerful opponents, with the threat of imprisonment, and worse, hanging over his head. But whatever fear Gerard might have felt, he left the Bishop of London’s palace for prison still protesting his Catholicism.²⁵

John Gerard was committed to the Marshalsea prison in Southwark on 5 March 1584. His year-long imprisonment was spent in the heady company of like-minded rebels against the nationalized Church: laymen and women arrested for their refusal to attend Protestant services and a number of priests awaiting execution. It was an intoxicating education. When at last his friends were able to secure his release from prison, in return for paid guarantees that he would not leave the country, his desire to become a Jesuit burnt fiercer than ever. At the end of May 1586 his chance came. An old friend of his, Anthony Babington, agreed to stand bail for him if he failed to appear before the authorities at the next quarter and John Gerard escaped to France. He was twenty-one.²⁶

From France, Gerard travelled south to Italy, where he entered the English College of Rome, the companion school to Dr William Allen’s successful Reims institution. By now his general eagerness to become a priest had transformed itself into the specific ambition of becoming a priest on the English mission. Pope Sixtus V granted him dispensation to take his holy orders early, some months short of the statutory age. The Society of Jesus agreed to admit him into their ranks as a novice and let him finish his training as he worked. And at last, on 15 August 1588, John Gerard became a Jesuit priest in the company of Edward Oldcorne. He was ready to return home.²⁷

Throughout late August and all of September, as the Armada fleet underwent its grim circumnavigation of the British Isles and rumour ran unchecked through the courts of Europe, Gerardand Oldcorne travelled north towards England, accompanied by two other priests. ‘Passing through Switzerland,’ Gerard wrote, ‘we stayed a night at Basle and decided to see the old Catholic buildings of the town: the Lutherans usually leave them intact but the Calvinists destroy them.’ At Reims, he noted, ‘we passed incognito’: the seminary city was full of spies. In Paris a prisoner in one of the city gaols calling himself Jacques Colerdin learned of their arrival. On 1 October Colerdin was able to scribble a letter to Sir Francis Walsingham in London, telling him that ‘There be 8 Priests over from Rome, whereof John Gerard … will be in England within five days.’ Colerdin, who described himself to the Archbishop of Paris as ‘an English priest and Bachelor in Theology’ in a petition he wrote seeking his release, was a Government informer.* His real name was Gilbert Gifford. He was, indeed, a Catholic priest, but since his arrest as an alleged accomplice in the Babington Plot he had found it prudent to switch sides in the religious conflict.† Now he was well placed to point out his fellow seminarians to the English authorities.²⁸

From Paris, Gerard and Oldcorne continued on to Eu, some miles north of Dieppe, in preparation for crossing the Channel. But here they received unwelcome news from England. ‘The Spanish Fleet’, wrote Gerard, ‘had exasperated the people against the Catholics; everywhere a hunt was being organised for Catholics and their houses searched; in every village and along all the roads and lanes very close watches were kept to catch them.’ Clearly conditions at home were far from ideal for them to attempt a landing in secret and for the next few weeks the pair were forced to kick their heels on the French coast, while their superiors back in Rome decided what should be done. At last a letter came through: ‘we were free’, wrote Gerard, ‘either to go ahead with the enterprise or stay back until things in England had quietened down. This was the answer we desired.’ Immediately, the two men set about finding a ship.²⁹

As John Gerard stood in the shadows of a Norfolk wood choosing the best and safest route to London, he had already committed treason, according to England’s latest laws. The act of 1585 ‘against Jesuits, seminary priests and such other like disobedient persons’, one of nine pieces of parliamentary legislation during Elizabeth’s reign to seek to redefine treachery in the face of a newly perceived menace, employed bully-boy language to make its point. Any Englishman ordained a Catholic priest since June 1559 would, the act threatened, soon find out ‘how dangerous it shall be for them … once to put their foot on land within any of her Majesty’s dominions’. In returning home, in stepping from his ship’s boat onto a Norfolk beach, John Gerard had become a traitor to his country. If caught, he would be punished accordingly. As he left the wood, heading westwards, he was spotted by a group of men walking towards him.*³⁰

Gerard takes up the story:

‘Walking boldly up to them I asked whether they knew anything about a stray hawk; perhaps they had heard its bell tinkling as it was flying around. I wanted them to believe that I had lost my bird and was wandering about the countryside in search of it [then] they would not be surprised because I was a stranger here and unfamiliar with the lanes and countryside; they would merely think that I had wandered here in my search … They told me they had not seen or heard a falcon recently and they seemed sorry that they could not put me on its track. So with a disappointed look I went off as if I were going to search for it in the trees and hedges round about.’³¹

This was his strategy for the rest of that day. Each time he saw someone working in the fields he approached them, asking them the same question: had they seen his hawk? His progress was slow. Occasionally he doubled back on his tracks to make his search more convincing. But gradually he moved inland, away from the sea.

‘At the end of the day I was soaked with rain and felt hungry. It had been a rough crossing and I had been able to take practically no food or sleep on board, so I turned for the night into an inn in a village I was passing, thinking that they were less likely to question a man they saw entering an inn.’ Inside, he made enquiries about buying a pony and found the people willing to help him. The following morning, Sunday, 30 October, he set off on horseback towards Norwich, no longer in any danger of being taken for a vagrant, but still at the mercy of the county watches. At the village of Worstead he was apprehended.³²

‘They ordered me to dismount, and asked me who I was and where I came from. I told them I was in the service of a certain lord who lived in another county – he did in fact know me well, although these men had not heard of him – and I explained that my falcon had flown away and I had come here to see whether I could recover it.’ But this time the watchers refused to release him, insisting he be brought before the constable and the officer of the watch for further questioning. Gerard submitted and was led to the village church where the two men were attending morning service. Now he was faced with a dilemma. ‘One of the watchers went in [to the church] and came back with the answer that [the officer] wanted me to come inside where he would see me at the end of the service.’ For Gerard it was a sin to enter a Protestant church. So Gerard refused to go in, claiming he was reluctant to leave his horse behind. When the officer at last came out to question him he was clearly angry and suspicious. ‘He asked me first where I came from and I named a number of places which I had learned were not far away. Then he asked me my name, employment, home, the reason for my coming, and I gave him the answers that I had given before. Finally on asking whether I was carrying any letters, I invited him to search me.’ The officer was unimpressed. He declared ‘it was his duty to take me before the Justice of the Peace’, and Gerard prepared himself for immediate arrest. Then suddenly the man relented, with the words, ‘You’ve got the look of an honest fellow. Go on then in God’s name.’ Later, Gerard attributed this stroke of good fortune to providence. Now, he hurriedly set off towards Norwich before the officer could change his mind.³³

Furnished by a fellow traveller with the name of a suitable inn on the southernmost outskirts of Norwich, Gerard circled the city walls. He avoided the busy London road, which led into the city through the well-guarded St Stephen’s Gates, and passed instead over common grazing land to Brazen Doors, a smaller set of gates that opened onto All Saints Green. From there it was a short walk to the inn on Market Hill, at the foot of Norwich Castle.³⁴

The inn was busy and Gerard settled himself down to observe. ‘I was there only a short time when in walked a man who seemed well known to the people of the house. He greeted me courteously and then sat down by the fire to warm himself. He began talking about some Catholic gentlemen imprisoned in the city and mentioned by name a man, one of whose relatives had been with me in the Marshalsea Prison … I listened carefully but said nothing.’ When the man left the room, Gerard asked his neighbour who he was. The reply was welcome news to him: ‘He is a very good fellow, except for the fact that he is a Papist.’ The man was out on bail from the city gaol after a decade in prison for his faith and he was, by common consent, ‘a most pig-headed’ Catholic.*³⁵

‘I kept quiet until the man returned and when the others had gone out I told him that I wanted to have a word with him in some safe place. I had heard he was a Catholic, I said, and was very pleased to hear it because I was one too.’ Briefly, Gerard explained how he came to be in Norwich and asked for the man’s assistance in getting to London. The man knew of no one travelling to the capital that Gerard could join, and so pass as one of their party, but he did know someone in town who might be able to help him and he left the inn to find this contact.³⁶

When he returned to the inn a short while later he asked Gerard to follow him out onto the street and into the thick of the bustling market. While the two men pretended to examine the various goods for sale they were observed from a distance by a third man. Soon he approached the pair and asked them both to come with him. He led the way through the narrow side streets of Norwich towards the city’s cathedral. There, in the cavernous nave of the great church, the man questioned Gerard intently before asking him outright whether he was a priest – in which case, said the man, he would offer him all the help he needed.* Gerard asked his name. Then he admitted he was a Jesuit priest sent from Rome.³⁷

The printers of Amsterdam, as they compiled their annual almanac for 1588, had predicted that late autumn would be lucky for some. So it had proved for John Gerard. The man in whose hands he had just placed his life was Edward Yelverton, one of the richest Catholics in Norfolk. That same evening Yelverton spirited Gerard out of Norwich and by Monday, 31 October the priest had gone to ground at Yelverton’s house at Grimston, 6½ miles northeast of King’s Lynn. After forty-eight hours at large Gerard had reached a safe haven. His work, though, had only just begun. And with the events of the summer that work had become harder still.³⁸

The Spanish Armada had achieved what no amount of religious reforms and parliamentary legislation over the preceding decades had been able to do. It had united a fractured nation behind its unhappy compromise of a nationalized Church in opposition to the Catholic crusade. It had bound Anglicanism and Englishness together seemingly indissolubly. And it had transformed all those who could not bring themselves to accept this new Church of England into potential traitors, fifth columnists willing, in the rhetoric of a royal proclamation issued that July, ‘to betray their own natural country and most unnaturally to join with foreign enemies in the spoil and destruction of the same’. To be a Catholic in the year 1588 was to be an unnatural Englishman. It was to be worse than that still, as a story told by a fellow Jesuit illustrated. In late August, as many Catholics awaited execution for their alleged treachery, a ‘certain lady went to a man of importance asking him to use his influence that the death of one of the condemned might be delayed. The first question was whether the person whose cause she pleaded was guilty of murder. She replied that he had not been condemned for any such thing, but only for the Catholic religion. Oh dear, said the gentleman, For his religion! If he had committed murder I should not have hesitated to comply with your request; but as it is a question of religion, I dare not interfere.’ To the English in Armada year, even homicide was less of an evil than Catholicism.³⁹

And Gerard had come to join a covert mission, the first undertaking of which was to ask English Catholics to stand up and be counted, to demonstrate their faith by refusing to attend the Protestant Church, to identify themselves to a Government seeking to eradicate them as traitors. Small wonder then that in an England still reeling from the events of that year, in an England crying out for revenge, this task had acquired Herculean proportions.*⁴⁰

Fourteen years earlier, though, for the first young English priests to embark upon this newly begun mission, their venture must have seemed no less a trial of strength. They may have been returning home to their family and friends, but at the same time they were entering an unfamiliar, hostile world: a beleaguered and suspicious England whose savagery had yet to be put to the test. And they were entering that world in secret, in disguise, in the very manner of the political secret agents their homeland believed them to be. Formidable, too, had been the challenge of establishing the mission at the start, of drawing together the dejected exiles from an Oxford University shattered by religious reforms, of schooling them in martyrdom and of dispatching them home in increasing numbers to face unknown perils.

For his ninth task Hercules had only to steal the Amazon Queen’s belt – a gift she herself had been willing to grant him. John Gerard and his fellows were attempting to steal the souls of English men and women back to the Catholic Church, and to do so under the nose of the, perhaps, even more redoubtable English Queen. It was a labour that would come at a high price.

* Regiomontanus’s real name was Johan Muller, from Konigsberg, now Kaliningrad, in Lithuania. He supplied Christopher Columbus with astronomical tables on his voyage across the Adantic.

*At the beginning of 1588 Dr John Harvey was commissioned by the Privy Council to write an academic pamphlet denouncing the accuracy of prophecies in general and Regiomontanus' in particular.

* Sixtus had said of Elizabeth ‘were she only a Catholic, she would be without her match, and we would esteem her highly’.

* His flagship, the San Martin, reached the Spanish port of Santander on 21 September, with 180 of her crew dead from disease and starvation, another forty killed in battle and the rest so weak the ship had to be towed into dock. Only some seventy ships of the fleet returned.

* In the context of this book the term ‘nationalism’ is not intended to convey any preoccupation with English ethnic identity; rather, it is intended to convey the growing sense of English sovereignty at this period, in response to the fragmentation of Christendom and England’s loss of its European territories.

* The Duke of Medina Sidonia’s sailing orders to his fleet confirmed that ‘the principal foundation and cause, that have moved the King his Majesty to make and continue this journey, hath been, and is, to serve God; and to return unto his church a great many of contrite souls, that are oppressed by the heretics, enemies to our holy catholic faith’.

† The terms Catholic, Protestant and Anglican should be applied with a certain linguistic caution. Broadly, the word ‘Catholic’ was by now recognized to refer only to those followers of the Roman Church. The word ‘Protestant’ referred initially only to German church reformers, though by the late sixteenth century it had acquired a wider reference and was in use in England to describe followers of the State Church. English Protestantism, though, was a very different animal from its European counterparts. The word ‘Anglican’ seems first to have been used as a derogatory term by King James VI of Scotland in 1598. It was not until much later that it became synonymous with the Church of England and English Protestantism.

* In 1585 Philip II had offered himself to Pope Sixtus V as the sword of the Catholic Church in the fight to reconcile England with Rome. Previously, French Catholics, led by the powerful Guise family, had planned a series of invasions, with the intention of deposing Elizabeth and replacing her with the half-French Mary, Queen of Scots (Mary’s mother was Mary of Guise). Mary was Elizabeth’s de facto heir apparent, although Elizabeth never acknowledged her as such.

† Heretics, as defined by St Thomas (II-II: 11: 1) were those who, having professed the faith of Christ, then proceeded to corrupt it from within. They differed from Infidels who refused to believe in Christ at all, and from Apostates who renounced Christianity for another faith, or no faith altogether. The word heresy derives from the Greek word for choice.

* Every detail of this landing is taken from an account of it written up afterwards by one of the two Jesuits, Father John Gerard.

* The sheriff was the Crown’s chief executive officer in a county, in charge of keeping the peace, dispensing justice, and overseeing local elections.

* He was arrested in a Paris brothel in 1587, though the precise nature of his crime remains unclear. He died in prison in 1590.

† The 1586 Babington Plot was the last in a series of Catholic attempts to assassinate Elizabeth and free Mary, Queen of Scots in advance of a foreign invasion; it led to Mary’s execution. Anthony Babington, Gerard’s friend, appears to have been a man of more devotion than sense and how much the plot was the work of agents provocateurs remains ambiguous. Gilbert Gifford’s role is particularly questionable and most believe he was working for Walsingham from the start. Gerard’s father was also arrested for alleged complicity in the plot. He was released in October 1588.

* The coastal counties had borne the brunt of the nation’s anxiety during the Armada conflict. Close watches had been kept throughout the summer months for spies, Spanish ships, and anything suspicious; now those same coastal watches were kept busy patrolling the countryside looking for vagabonds. The vagabonds in question were disbanded sailors and militiamen, laid off without their promised pay and in search of food and work. Since the Armada, an order had been issued that any vagabond ‘found with any manifest offence tending to stir troubles or rebellion … [was] … to be executed by martial law’.

* The ‘pig-headed’ Catholic gentfeman was almost certainly the Norfolk landowner Robert Downes, whose Melton estate lay just a mile west of Norwich. He was arrested in 1578 for his refusal to attend the Protestant Church. He lost his estates in Suffolk and Essex and in 1602 he surrendered most of his life interest in Melton to the Queen. He was still in Norwich gaol in 1598. He died in 1610.

* Catholics believed that though they could not enter a Protestant church where divine services were held, the nave of a cathedral was part of the general precincts of the building and therefore not sacrosanct.